Since the introduction of Gmail’s new Promotions tab, many have found their emails sent into their receivers’ Gmail Promotions tab instead of the Primary tab. This can indeed be pretty problematic when that happens to your transactional emails instead, because your newly signed up customers or users would be missing out on your important emails. It does seem that Google’s engine may not be that smart after all.
Interestingly, I scourced through the internet and found many possible solutions, but they did not work. So what worked?
Google Email Markup
The most important thing that you need to implement, is, Google’s Email Markup.
By using Google’s own email markup, you are allowing Google to understand the purpose of the email. If you are sending a transactional email, it makes sense to inform Google that it is not a promotional or marketing email. So obviously, this should be the most important factor you should be considering.
If you do not understand what this factor is all about, you may want to contact us if you need some help there.
Provide Unsubscribe Options
Another important factor would be to ensure that you are providing unsubscribe options for your email receiver.
Unsubscribe links also allows the receiver an option to opt out of future emails, so that the user will not set the email as spam which may cause blacklisting.
Avoid URL Shorteners
Gmail is not very happy with shortened URLs, so unless necessary, try to avoid URL shorteners. I guess it may not even make much sense to shorten URLs when you can just display it as a button. Yes, so do avoid shortened links.
Other basic measures
There are also plenty of other basic measures that I would not emphasize, and they include implementing DKIM and SPF, and avoiding unused email addresses. I believe these can be easily googled, but the reason why I am leaving these out is just because they are actually really pretty basic.
If you are a marketer, you might want to think carefully and note the fine line between a transactional email and a marketing email. It might not be that hard to disguise a marketing email as a transactional email, but maybe you just need the help of some developers with the necessary know-how. Contact us if you need some help.